>Just over a third of all Americans are tenants, and the proportion is growing. Renter households are increasing at triple the rate of homeowners. They are disproportionately young and non-white: over half of Black and Latino households rent, as well as roughly two-thirds of Americans under the age of 35. The median renter household income is $47,000. Nationally, rents are up more than 23 percent since Biden took office, the sharpest four-year increase on record. More than half of renter households—over 22 million—are rent-burdened, meaning they pay over 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, and one in five report severe rent burden, paying over 50 percent. These, too, are record numbers, and rates are even higher for Black, Latino, and young tenants, who are also most likely to live in substandard conditions, with absent or inadequate repairs, heat, hot water, or electricity.
>The despair goes deeper. Almost a quarter of renters report skipping meals to make their monthly rent payments. The expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections and rental assistance programs—which Biden and congressional Democrats did nothing to prevent—has caused evictions to spike back to pre-Covid levels. Homelessness is at an all-time high. Wider economic discontent can also be connected to housing. An astonishing 75 percent of swing-state voters said housing costs were the most stressful economic issue for their families, and nearly two-thirds said housing unaffordability made them feel negatively about the economy. Rent remains the single largest factor keeping inflation high, accounting for half the overall increase in inflation as recently as September.
Yes, the concerns about the economy seems largely focused as concerns about housing. Even people with homes are worried about losing them, and worried about their children not being able to find places. Likewise a lot of worry about crime is likely from increased homelessness, a symptom of the crisis.
>As a former member of Biden’s National Economic Council tweeted following the election, “I strongly support investments in additional housing supply. But you can’t tell a room full of renters facing 25% rent hikes that our solution is more supply that will bring down rents a few years from now. What was our message to those renters?”
He’s right though, “we will solve your issue in an indirect way that you don’t understand very well despite rents having increased massively under us already” is just not a very convincing argument. After all as the article claims earlier, they’re not feeling very good.
The fault at play here is that efforts to counteract NIMBYs didn’t happen earlier. State politicians too scared of pushback slow walked efforts to push through local roadblocks and the federal government is well, even if they had the authority to do much Congress is gridlocked.
I think one thing that tends to do poorly is the animosity towards popular solutions presented.
>Even non-renters grasp the severity of the situation. One recent real estate industry survey found more than 80 percent of Americans support capping rents. Another poll showed 70 percent of swing state voters were more likely to vote for candidates who backed rent controls.
This is something we really need to contend with. Rent control is terrible, but it’s one of the most popular ideas among the general population and it’s a hard sell to say that all sorts of zoning and blocking affordable housing and other supply restrictions by existing homeowners is allowed, but any supply restrictive acts that benefit the existing renters is suddenly too much. Rich suburban NIMBYs block supply, no big deal. Poor renters just concerned about their immediate finacial situation get told to think about the long term, and unsurprisingly they aren’t very happy with it. The long term does not help that they’re getting evicted *today*
So what happens instead?
>Above all, what Trump delivered that Harris didn’t was a complete narrative, one that at least acknowledged hardship and named villains, however unjustly. As usual, the blame fell on immigrants. Trump seized on a bizarre video of armed men knocking on an apartment door in Aurora, Colorado, who Trump claimed were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who had taken control of the housing complex. Local residents, police and elected officials all denied that gangs controlled the complex, whose squalid conditions were instead the fault of the management company, which was being sued by the city of Aurora for creating uninhabitable conditions, including roach infestations, crumbling walls, and uncollected trash. Undeterred, Trump vowed to launch what he called Operation Aurora, “the largest mass deportation in American history,” in the Denver suburb on day one of his Presidency.
>While in keeping with the Trump’s constant attacks on immigrants, the episode was also an effort to capitalize on widespread tenant misery. He promoted another fraudulent account of Venezuelan gang members taking over a building in Chicago, and J. D. Vance later blamed rising housing costs in Springfield, Ohio on the Haitian immigrants whom he and Trump also baselessly accused of eating cats and dogs. Trump ran online ads with pictures of heavily tattooed Latino men, implied to be gang members, behind the text, “Your new apartment managers if Kamala’s re-elected.” These attacks fed xenophobic bigotry, but they also opened a novel channel for the anger and despair that so many renters feel about their homes. Voters know someone must be to blame for decrepit and costly housing.
This refusal to compromise openly with such extremely popular policy by the more moderate parts means instead of getting a plan to build three million houses and a continuation of things like the PRO housing grants (a grant plan to promote rezoning), we get Trump who wants to “protect the suburbs” and blames migrants.
ToschePowerConverter on
The biggest problem I think is that housing (and other important issues for people like crime) are most impacted by local and state level politics, and especially by city councils and judges. A lot of younger and poorer voters also don’t tend to participate in those elections that usually happen in off years or are further down the ballot in a presidential election. And then the president gets blamed when rent is high, even though Dean Preston impacts rent prices in San Francisco a lot more than Joe Biden does.
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>Just over a third of all Americans are tenants, and the proportion is growing. Renter households are increasing at triple the rate of homeowners. They are disproportionately young and non-white: over half of Black and Latino households rent, as well as roughly two-thirds of Americans under the age of 35. The median renter household income is $47,000. Nationally, rents are up more than 23 percent since Biden took office, the sharpest four-year increase on record. More than half of renter households—over 22 million—are rent-burdened, meaning they pay over 30 percent of their income toward rent and utilities, and one in five report severe rent burden, paying over 50 percent. These, too, are record numbers, and rates are even higher for Black, Latino, and young tenants, who are also most likely to live in substandard conditions, with absent or inadequate repairs, heat, hot water, or electricity.
>The despair goes deeper. Almost a quarter of renters report skipping meals to make their monthly rent payments. The expiration of pandemic-era tenant protections and rental assistance programs—which Biden and congressional Democrats did nothing to prevent—has caused evictions to spike back to pre-Covid levels. Homelessness is at an all-time high. Wider economic discontent can also be connected to housing. An astonishing 75 percent of swing-state voters said housing costs were the most stressful economic issue for their families, and nearly two-thirds said housing unaffordability made them feel negatively about the economy. Rent remains the single largest factor keeping inflation high, accounting for half the overall increase in inflation as recently as September.
Yes, the concerns about the economy seems largely focused as concerns about housing. Even people with homes are worried about losing them, and worried about their children not being able to find places. Likewise a lot of worry about crime is likely from increased homelessness, a symptom of the crisis.
>As a former member of Biden’s National Economic Council tweeted following the election, “I strongly support investments in additional housing supply. But you can’t tell a room full of renters facing 25% rent hikes that our solution is more supply that will bring down rents a few years from now. What was our message to those renters?”
He’s right though, “we will solve your issue in an indirect way that you don’t understand very well despite rents having increased massively under us already” is just not a very convincing argument. After all as the article claims earlier, they’re not feeling very good.
The fault at play here is that efforts to counteract NIMBYs didn’t happen earlier. State politicians too scared of pushback slow walked efforts to push through local roadblocks and the federal government is well, even if they had the authority to do much Congress is gridlocked.
I think one thing that tends to do poorly is the animosity towards popular solutions presented.
>Even non-renters grasp the severity of the situation. One recent real estate industry survey found more than 80 percent of Americans support capping rents. Another poll showed 70 percent of swing state voters were more likely to vote for candidates who backed rent controls.
This is something we really need to contend with. Rent control is terrible, but it’s one of the most popular ideas among the general population and it’s a hard sell to say that all sorts of zoning and blocking affordable housing and other supply restrictions by existing homeowners is allowed, but any supply restrictive acts that benefit the existing renters is suddenly too much. Rich suburban NIMBYs block supply, no big deal. Poor renters just concerned about their immediate finacial situation get told to think about the long term, and unsurprisingly they aren’t very happy with it. The long term does not help that they’re getting evicted *today*
So what happens instead?
>Above all, what Trump delivered that Harris didn’t was a complete narrative, one that at least acknowledged hardship and named villains, however unjustly. As usual, the blame fell on immigrants. Trump seized on a bizarre video of armed men knocking on an apartment door in Aurora, Colorado, who Trump claimed were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who had taken control of the housing complex. Local residents, police and elected officials all denied that gangs controlled the complex, whose squalid conditions were instead the fault of the management company, which was being sued by the city of Aurora for creating uninhabitable conditions, including roach infestations, crumbling walls, and uncollected trash. Undeterred, Trump vowed to launch what he called Operation Aurora, “the largest mass deportation in American history,” in the Denver suburb on day one of his Presidency.
>While in keeping with the Trump’s constant attacks on immigrants, the episode was also an effort to capitalize on widespread tenant misery. He promoted another fraudulent account of Venezuelan gang members taking over a building in Chicago, and J. D. Vance later blamed rising housing costs in Springfield, Ohio on the Haitian immigrants whom he and Trump also baselessly accused of eating cats and dogs. Trump ran online ads with pictures of heavily tattooed Latino men, implied to be gang members, behind the text, “Your new apartment managers if Kamala’s re-elected.” These attacks fed xenophobic bigotry, but they also opened a novel channel for the anger and despair that so many renters feel about their homes. Voters know someone must be to blame for decrepit and costly housing.
This refusal to compromise openly with such extremely popular policy by the more moderate parts means instead of getting a plan to build three million houses and a continuation of things like the PRO housing grants (a grant plan to promote rezoning), we get Trump who wants to “protect the suburbs” and blames migrants.
The biggest problem I think is that housing (and other important issues for people like crime) are most impacted by local and state level politics, and especially by city councils and judges. A lot of younger and poorer voters also don’t tend to participate in those elections that usually happen in off years or are further down the ballot in a presidential election. And then the president gets blamed when rent is high, even though Dean Preston impacts rent prices in San Francisco a lot more than Joe Biden does.